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195 In November 1976, a delegation of African American artists and writers arrived at the José Martí International Airport in Havana on a flight from Mexico City. The trip, which was led by Robert Chrisman, editor of the journal Black Scholar, the leading publication of the radicalized black intelligentsia in the United States, occurred only a few weeks after the frightening bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight by anti-Castro terrorists. Chrisman hailed the group as the “first black American delegation of cultural workers to visit Cuba” since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The group of “cultural workers ” he assembled included some of the foremost African American writers and artists of the day: Bernice Reagon, Phyl Garland, Samella Lewis, Alice Walker, William Marshall, Theresa George, Conyus Calhoun, and Lance Jeffers . The delegation sought to witness the “development of culture within a revolutionary context,” and more specifically, “the interface between the African components of Cuba with the non-African, to gauge the extent to which Cuba was developing a revolutionary national culture.” The Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People), a branch of the Cuban revolutionary government, arranged the visitors’ itinerary . During their two-week stay on the island, the group listened to lectures on Cuban history and culture, attended a dance performance at the Parque Lenin, and visited various museums, including the Museo Histórico de Guanabacoa , where they saw an exhibit on the Abakuá secret society and other Afrodescended cultures in Cuba. The 1976 tour, which was one of a number of trips to the island led by Chrisman during the 1970s and 1980s, impressed him enough to lead him to conclude that Cuba was pioneering a “renaissance in the Third World.”1 The visit of the Black Scholar delegation in 1976 illustrates the continuities and ruptures in African American and Afro-Cuban linkages after the Cuban Epilogue 196 Epilogue revolutionary government of Fidel Castro took power in 1959. Like earlier generations of African American travelers to Cuba, the delegation was particularly interested in the island’s Afro-descended population. However, unlike their predecessors, these African American visitors did not go to Cuba merely to see “their own people” or to take in the Caribbean sun, although they surely enjoyed the island’s pleasant climate during their stay. Instead, they wanted to witness firsthand the Cuban government’s effort to make a revolutionary national culture from the nation’s African and non-African cultural roots. Chrisman ’s comments illustrate the ways in which the revolutionary government further nationalized (and internationalized) blackness in its representation of Cuban national culture. The delegation’s objectives also show how the revolution ’s brand of mestizaje ideology had altered the debate on blackness in Cuba from an emphasis on “race relations” to a focus on “culture.” This subtle shift was a by-product of the Cuban government’s claim that the revolution had virtually eliminated racism on the island, a position that was championed by its supporters, including some African Americans.2 After all, Fidel Castro himself had made the unprecedented declaration that Cubans were a “Latin African people” in a speech justifying the sending of Cuban troops in support of the revolutionary struggle in Angola earlier that year. Thus, while the Black Scholar group was attentive to evidence of racism and sexism on the island, it was more concerned with ascertaining how the revolution was integrating Afro-Cuban culture into a new Cuban revolutionary “national culture.”3 The Cuban Revolution’s explicit solidarity with Afro-descended people throughout the diaspora, along with the emergence of nation-states in Africa and other parts of the “Third World,” dramatically altered the making of Afrodiasporic linkages after 1959. In the era of decolonization and Third World revolution, the discourse of diaspora was largely submerged by a competing discourse of “nation.” Diasporization, which had been carried out largely by nonstate actors since the era of the slave trade, was championed by “black” or explicitly antiracist states and by “national liberation” movements that sought to overthrow colonial rule. African Americans, who were still embroiled in their own struggles for equality during the civil rights era, sought out linkages with many of these nation-states, including Ghana, Algeria, and Cuba. The heightened importance of the concept of “nation” in Afro-diasporic formations is clear in the Black Scholar group’s itinerary in Cuba. Like previous African American visitors to the island, the delegation received a warm welcome from their...

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